Criminality Quotes

“Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.”
― John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy

“Each of us has a measure of criminality.”
― Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

“What a fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead men never bring awkward stories to light. The prospect of the gallows, too, makes them hardy and bold. Ah, it’s a fine thing for the trade! Five of them strung up in a row, and none left to play booty or turn white-livered!”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penelogical theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens, You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“Granting that there is some truth to the theory that defects in society give rise to the emergence of criminals, I still maintain that those who use this theory as a defense of criminality are overlooking the fact that there are many people in this defective society who survive without resorting to crime. The argument to the contrary is pure sophistry.”
― Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography

“Murder isn't the most logical way to escape a difficult situation. It only leads to a different difficult situation.”
― Keigo Higashino, The Devotion of Suspect X

“I always thought,' I said, 'that a man became a cop to be shielded from his own criminality.”
― Norman Mailer

“I thought crime was a game,” he said. “But if it is, it’s one I don’t think anyone can win.”
― Nenia Campbell, Rent Girl

“And if you learn only one thing from the ensuing maybe let it be this: the police were not merely interested observers who occasionally witnessed criminality and were then basically compelled to make an arrest, rather the police had the special ability to in effect create Crime by making an arrest almost whenever they wishes, so widespread was wrongdoing. Consequently, the decision on who would become a body was often affected by overlooked factors like the candidate's degree of humility, the neighborhood it lived in, and most often the relevant officers' need for overtime.”
― Sergio De La Pava, A Naked Singularity

“How exhausting all this was. In fact, if only people knew how madly tiresome it is to be a criminal...!”
― Hermann Hesse, Klein und Wagner

“Guilt is not an intrinsically helpful emotion for future decision-making. And often the spiral of guilt and shame can lead criminals to remain criminals.
This idea was so intriguing to me, for personal reasons that should arlready be clear, that I later took it on for my undergraduate senior thesis. My paper, which I turned in six weeks early and for which I received an A, was titled "Remorse and Absolution: Peas in a Pod or Dangerous Bunkmates?”
― Sascha Rothchild, Blood Sugar

“There is a very simple relationship between increased socioeconomic rifts in the society and increased violence, criminality, war, increased lack of trust between people, health problems and social exclusion - but it seems to be very difficult for people to understand this simple relationship.”
― Swami Dhyan Giten

“The legal and judicial system view substance use as a criminal matter; while the mental health system has been fighting for generations to change that particular perspective.”
― Asa Don Brown

“The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like 'evil' and 'soul' will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is out of whack—but in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals 'internal forces we do not understand yet.”
― robert sapolsky

“You don't have to believe in coincidences because they happen every day. The trick is to be able to discern when something is more than coincidence.”
― Glenn Jones, Introduction to Intelligence Analysis - work in progress

“Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures 'deserves' to be banned from driving... it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most of the people who were prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different from us—sincere, cautious, and ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping to bequeath their children a safer world. Just operating with an unrecognizably different mind-set.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“The underworld, the penitentiary, symbol of the daring which overrides calculation and reflection, to which all means are good, which can dispense with the hypocrisy of formally constituted authority, hideous representative of the interests of the empty belly, the bloody, swift protest of hunger!”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Most normal people who watch TV or movies and read books for fun— they’ve been sold a bill of pop-culture goods. Profiling never caught any killer.”
― Eric Rickstad, Remote: The Six

“Kitalifa ni utiifu kamili, woga, umbali (kwa maana ya kuwa mbali na biashara ya mamafia wengine mpaka kwa makubaliano maalumu) na nidhamu ya kutoshirikiana na mamlaka zote za serikali. Ukishtakiwa kwa kosa la madawa au ujambazi ambalo hukufanya, utatumikia kifungo mpaka mwisho bila kushirikiana na polisi (kwa maana ya kutaja aliyehusika au waliohusika na uhalifu huo) hata kama aliyehusika au waliohusika hana au hawana uhusiano wowote na Kolonia Santita. Falsafa ya Kitalifa ni Sheria ya Kitalifa ya Kiapo cha Swastika cha Kolonia Santita. Na adhabu ya kuvunja sheria hiyo ni kifo.”
― Enock Maregesi

“If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.”
― John Connolly, A Game of Ghosts

“For as long as statistics have been kept, blacks have had higher crime rates than whites. Containing crime is one of the top priorities of any society, so it is perplexing that the United States has added to its crime problem through immigration. Hispanics, who have been by far the most numerous post-1965 immigrant group, commit crimes at rates lower than blacks but higher than whites.
Some people claim that all population groups commit crimes at the same rates, and that racial differences in incarceration rates reflect police and justice system bias. This view is wrong. The US Department of Justice carefully tracks murder, which is the violent crime for which racial data on victim and perpetrator are most complete. In 2005, the department noted that blacks were six times more likely than whites to be victims of murder and seven times more likely to commit murder.
There are similar differences for other crimes. The United States regularly conducts a huge, 100,000-person crime study known as the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), in which Americans are asked to describe the crimes of which they have been victim during the year, and to indicate race of perpetrator. NCVS figures are therefore a reliable indication of the racial distribution of violent criminals. The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) is another huge database that records the races of all suspects reported to the police as well as those arrested by police. Both these data sets prove that blacks commit a vastly disproportionate amount of violent crime. In fact, blacks are arrested less frequently than would be expected from reports by crime victims of the race of perpetrator. Racial differences in arrest rates reflect racial differences in crime rates, not police bias.
Justice Department figures show that blacks commit crimes and are incarcerated at roughly 7.2 times the white rate, and Hispanics at 2.9 times the white rate. (Asians are the least crime-prone group in America, and are incarcerated at only 22 percent of the white rate.) Robbery or “mugging” shows the greatest disparities, with blacks offending at 15 times and Hispanics at just over four times the white rate.
There are practically no crimes blacks and Hispanics do not commit at higher rates than whites, whether it is larceny, car theft, drug offenses, burglary, rape, or alcohol offenses. Even for white collar crimes—fraud, racketeering, bribery/conflict of interest, embezzlement—blacks are incarcerated at three to five times the white rate, and Hispanics at about twice the white rate.
Racial differences in crime rates are such an embarrassment they can interfere with law enforcement. In 2010 the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority had a problem with scores of young people openly beating fares—which cuts into revenue and demoralizes other riders. It considered a crackdown, but decided against it. The scoff-laws were overwhelmingly black, and the transit authority did not have the stomach to take any action that would fall heavily on minorities.”
― Jared Taylor, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century

“One can try to mask bad behavior as a reaction to a perceived act of criminality; that is the easiest way to justify throwing the rules of law out the window.”
― Carlos Wallace

“However, as we see in the writings of several liberal political economists, the main problem was not poverty per se, since poverty was actually believed to play a useful function in compelling certain groups of people to labour. Rather, the problem was that there was a constant threat of the poor falling into indigence, which, it was argued, encouraged immoral and criminal offences, thus rendering society less secure. The nineteenth-century institutions and discourses that governed poverty and criminality worked together to police the line between poverty and indigence and to preserve the former while eliminating the threat associated with the latter.”
― Adrienne Roberts, Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare

“Ongoing aggression not only impacts individuals, it also destabilizes social groups and disrupts functional social relationships. The uncertainty, ambiguity, and stress resulting from ongoing aggression and violence may impact the biological fitness of all group members.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“Since the price of aggression can be high, individual fitness depends on the ability to accurately calculate potential costs. This requires a reliable assessment of the condition, motivation, and intent of potential adversaries.”
― Candace Alcorta, Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion and Violence

“From the perspective of life history theory, a speeded-up metabolism, less trust, less relaxation and more suspicion and risk-taking might be adaptive for abusive homes or violent neighborhoods. In such environments there is little emotional security or expectation that things will work out well.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“When Hammett turns to the respectable world, the world of respectable society, of affluence and influence, of open personal and political power, he finds only more of the same. The respectability of respectable American society is as much a fiction and a fraud as the phony respectable society manufactured by the criminals. Indeed, he unwaveringly represents the world of crime as a reproduction in both structure and detail of the modern capitalist society it depends on, preys off, and is part of. He not only continually juxtaposes and connects the ambiguously fictional worlds of art and writing with the fraudulently fictional worlds of society; he connects them, juxtaposes them, and sees them in dizzying and baffling interaction... It is into this bottomlessly equivocal, endlessly fraudulent and brutally acquisitive world that Hammett precipitates the Op.”
― Steven Marcus, The Continental Op

“The integration of policing and homeless services blurs the boundary between the maintenance of economic security and the investigation of crime, between poverty and criminality, tightening a net of constraint that tracks and traps the unhoused.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“The plain and perhaps regrettable fact is that it is part of the eternal human psyche and cycle for the normal individual to derive cathartic satisfaction and enjoyment from savouring the crimes of others, and from luxuriously dreaming of personally committing them. Similar cathartic satisfaction is afforded by contemplating the punishment of those who are caught. Nobody likes a loser and therefore we believe they get what they deserve. What do you believe you deserve for the undetected crimes and secret moral outrages you have committed in thought or action? Absolution?”
― Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis

“If you should chance to strike up a conversation with an articulate, English-speaking Russian in, say, the restaurant of one of the luxury hotels along Lake Geneva, and he is wearing a $3,000 suit and a pair of Gucci loafers, and he tells you that he is an executive of a Russian trading company and wants to talk to you about a joint venture, then there are four possibilities. He may be what he says he is. He may be a Russian intelligence officer working under commercial cover. He may be part of a Russian organized crime group. But the really interesting possibility is that he may be all three—and that none of those three institutions have any problem with the arrangement.”
― James Woolsey